Published 4:00 am, Sunday, September 27, 1998

KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST

King Leopold II of Belgium, not much remembered today outside his home country, was one of history's monsters.

A tall, cold man with a beard shaped like a straw broom, he felt frustrated upon ascending the throne in 1865. He was set to rule a country barely larger than Maryland, and, as a mere constitutional monarch, his every dictate was subject to approval by elected officials. He yearned to wield absolute power, to gather spoils, to erect immense monuments to his glory.

In 1877, meanwhile, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley emerged from the forest near the mouth of the Congo River. After a checkered career in Britain and America, Stanley had found fame by locating the missing missionary Dr. David Livingstone in East Africa, and now he had accomplished another long- awaited feat: He had traced the immense and serpentine Congo to its source.

Leopold, who had been trying to find himself a lucrative colony, wasted no time. He got Stanley to retrace his steps and survey the territory, and managed an end run around the other European powers, laying claim to the gigantic area drained by the Congo and its tributaries -- not for Belgium, but for himself alone.

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Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost" is an absorbing and horrifying account of the traffic in human misery that went on in Leopold's so-called Congo Free State, and of the efforts of a handful of heroic crusaders to bring the atrocities to light. Among other things, it stands as a reminder of how quickly enormities can be forgotten.

The Congo Free State was organized with one single purpose -- to make money as quickly as possible -- and so the word "genocide" cannot be applied with any precision, but the fact remains that between 1880 and 1920 the population was halved. University of California at Berkeley journalism professor Hochschild, a founder of Mother Jones magazine and involved as a board member in its recent editorial turmoil, enumerates the causes of that depopulation: 1) murder, 2) starvation, exhaustion and exposure, 3) disease, and 4) a lowered birth rate.

An extraordinary percentage of the Belgian officials who worked in the Congo were sociopaths. Hochschild proposes several plausible candidates as the model for Kurtz in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"; there actually was more than one man who decorated his garden with skulls! But murder also went on mundanely, on a daily basis.

Initially the Congo's main source of wealth was ivory, and villages might be exterminated if they did not hand over a sufficient number of tusks. Soon, though, rubber was the chief product, and time was of the essence. Rubber plantations had been established in South America and Southeast Asia, but their crops would take a few years to achieve maturity. In the meantime, the wild rubber vines of the Congo had to be tapped quickly, while the market could still be cornered.

This led to every sort of abuse, officially abetted. The white officers of the military Force Publique were furnished with ammunition when they conscripted laborers for rubber- gathering expeditions. To prevent them from squandering rounds on such things as hunting, they were required to supply one human right hand for every shot fired. An American missionary reported in 1899 that in just one region, 6,000 cartridges had been used in six months, and he added, "It means more than 6,000 (deaths), for the people have told me repeatedly that the soldiers kill children with the butt of their guns."

Murder, as Hochschild points out, was not even the major cause of death. Tens of thousands were worked to death; crops were destroyed so that many starved; many fled into the forest, only to die there. For that matter, missionaries in the 1910s noticed gaps in the population, such as an absence of births during a seven-year period.

Hochschild's book is not simply a recital of horrors, though. It also tells the story of a few people who waged what can be seen in retrospect as the world's first human-rights campaign.

The first of these was a black American, George Washington Williams, who after a considerable picaresque career -- by his early 30s he had fought in the Civil War, been a minister, a lawyer and a newspaper publisher and had written a "History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880," among other things -- went to the Congo to try to find a homeland for former slaves.

Instead he found what he called "the Siberia of the African Continent," a place where slavery continued unabated. In 1890 he published open letters to Leopold and to President Benjamin Harrison, listing the abuses he had witnessed. Despite efforts at spin control by the Belgian court, his allegations were widely covered by the European and American press, and were taken seriously. Unfortunately, Williams, who alone among the reformers of his time pressed the point that the land had been stolen from its inhabitants, died of tuberculosis before he had a chance to organize his campaign.

It was not until nearly 10 years later that the cause was taken up by E. D. Morel, an employee of a British steamship line involved in commercial traffic between Belgium and the Congo. One day on the Antwerp docks it dawned on him that ships were being sent to Africa empty of any cargo but men and ammunition, but coming back laden with spoils -- the pretense of "trade" was a sham. He resigned his job and devoted himself to investigation, single-handedly writing and publishing a weekly paper in which he reported every bit of information he could glean from the press, Belgian parliamentary debates and dispatches from missionaries and other sources on site.

Morel's worldwide campaign attracted such celebrities as Arthur Conan Doyle; Mark Twain, who wrote the broad but effective "King Leopold's Soliloquy"; and the British diplomat and future Irish patriot Roger Casement, who compiled an unanswerable dossier documenting atrocities that at the time seemed barely credible.

The campaign succeeded insofar as Leopold was forced by international pressure to hand the Congo over to Belgian control. For a while conditions appeared to improve, and the campaign dissolved itself. Unfortunately, within a few years conditions had essentially reverted.

Hochschild's gripping narrative, as dense as a novel and laden with subplots, shows among many other things the roots of the chaos and bloodshed ravaging the Congo today.